The New York Studio School was lively Wednesday evening as Johns Hopkins University professor Michael Fried and New Criterion coeditor and co-publisher Roger Kimball offered starkly varying views on 19th-century French realist painter Gustave Courbet.

Speaking first, Mr. Kimball showed an image of a stag hunt and said he thought such a scene by Courbet was “immediately accessible” and “generally unproblematic – or so I thought.” Drawing upon arguments from his book “The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art,” Mr. Kimball spoke against the imposition of late-20th-century theory on 19th-century art. Courbet’s painting, he said, was not fundamentally an “allegory about its own production.” He quoted philosopher Roger Scruton: “There is no greater error in the study of human things than to believe that the search for what is essential must lead us to what is hidden.”

Mr. Kimball addressed Mr. Fried’s work,saying the professor has “clearly read a lot and doesn’t let you forget it.” He mentioned Mr. Fried’s long and “sometimes arcane notes” including digressions on Hegel and Marx. On the subject of Courbet’s “The Wheat Sifters,” Mr. Kimball rejected Mr. Fried’s construing of grain as “menstrual blood.” Mr. Kimball said, “Courbet painted grain not blood.” “Ask yourself, what would Courbet make of this” interpretation, if he were here? Mr. Kimball likened this style of artistic interpretation to a textual version of the illustrated children’s series “Where’s Waldo.” Mr. Kimball asked, “Where’s Gustave?” He said that in Mr. Fried’s interpretation, “Courbet is there, but sometimes you really have to look.”

Mr. Kimball said that in one of Mr. Fried’s interpretations, the viewer was asked to imagine a dead deer’s underside. Mr. Kimball took this to task, arguing that it intruded on the reader’s “credulity” and exhibited a flight from reality.

Mr. Kimball likened a critic to a marriage broker or middleman whose task was to create a kind of introduction and then get out of the way.

When Mr. Fried first spoke, he said he was “not going to respond” to Mr. Kimball. Mr. Fried said the ground rules had initially been that each speaker was to talk for 20 to 25 minutes on Courbet “without mentioning the other person by name” but unfortunately there had been a miscommunication. He said during questions from the audience, he might address Mr. Kimball’s remarks, and then it would be “no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

The author of “Courbet’s Realism” went on to say that Courbet was “one of the handful of artists for whom the self-portrait is an absolutely fundamental genre.” In offering a detailed examination of certain paintings of Courbet, Mr. Fried argued that the painter was “making art not just with his eyes but with his whole body.” Mr. Fried placed his own scholarship in the context of a much larger project: a trilogy trying to figure out an account of how in late 1862 Edouard Manet could get up one day and paint “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe.” A crucial issue emerged in France, Mr. Fried said: that of the relation of the painter to the beholder.

He said Courbet’s fundamental project was to paint himself into his pictures literally and corporeally. Courbet infused his own bodily feeling into his painting, he said. Courbet as a painter, Mr. Fried said, was trying to close the gap between himself and his paintings.

For Courbet, painting was a “twohanded operation.” Showing various paintings, such as “Man With the Leather Belt” and “After Dinner at Ornans,” Mr. Fried examined some of what he called recurring deep structures. He later remarked: “I’m not at all sure Courbet would find this absurd.”

Mr. Fried said Courbet was not “a simple guy” who went bowling, drank beer, or painted what he saw. He showed a painting in which Courbet allegorized his own career as a painter. Mr. Fried offered a “knockdown” argument for his thesis, but Mr. Kimball said, “I don’t see it.”

During the question-and-answer period, two audience members told them, “You’re talking past each other.” One man said that while Mr. Kimball offers a corrective to excesses in the academy, he didn’t think his criticism found an apt subject in Mr. Fried.

The most tense moment came when Mr. Fried responded to Mr. Kimball’s suggestion that some art theory is the enemy of art and that some art historians may not like art. “Egregious,” Mr. Fried said.

One audience member asked Mr. Kimball whether there was a motive or agenda behind his “discourse.” Mr. Kimball spoke of uncluttering the path to seeing art and said the best way he knew was calling attention to some excesses of interpretation.

There were a few points of agreement, however. When Mr. Fried spoke about the elegance of Courbet’s handling of paint, Mr. Kimball concurred. But the two could not even agree about agreeing. When the moderator asked if there was something about Courbet on which both could agree, Mr. Fried abruptly replied that there was absolutely nothing they could agree on.

gshapiro@nysun.com